Nicholas Russell in The Baffler:
In David Fincher’s most mainstream film, The Social Network, an aggrieved ex of Mark Zuckerberg tells him that “the internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.” Disappearing ink perhaps, given how difficult it has become to search for useful or accurate information, let alone its source, amid the hallucinatory derangements of artificial intelligence. Media literacy has never been more important. Society has never been lazier.
For the past few months, I’ve been researching how science fiction has been used as a guide for predicting the future. This has included reading interviews and speeches, the testimony of would-be prophets. Naturally, certain quotes pop up like weeds—but, in the case of the more platitudinal selections, no one can seem to agree on who actually said them. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” was either coined by Danish physicist Niels Bohr or mythic Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. It’s entirely possible both men did, in fact, say some variation of the quote, though it’s more likely that Bohr, who was forty years older, said it first. But then again, he may not have said it at all.
The origin of the less elegant but more popular “We can predict everything, except the future” is similarly elusive. In 2012, user1202136 on the Stack Exchange forum for English etymology asked about the quote’s source, a question that’s been viewed four thousand times. The highest-rated answer, provided by a user going by Sven Yargs—who, according to his profile, has answered 3,444 other questions—is exhaustive in its detail: “The earliest instance of that approximate wording that I could find in a Google Books search is from David Redburn, ‘The ‘Graying’ of the World’s Population,’ in Social Gerontology (1998): ‘An oft-stated demographer’s joke comments, ‘it is easy to predict everything except the future’ and while this is demographic humor, or lack of it, it does relate the trepidation with which population specialists approach projections.’”
More here.
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